Paired Parton Trial States for the Superfluid-Fractional Chern Insulator Transition

We consider a model of hard-core bosons on a lattice half-filling a Chern band such that the system has a continuous transition between a fractional Chern insulator (FCI) and a superfluid state (SF) depending on the bandwidth to bandspacing ratio. We construct a parton-inspired trial wave function Ansatz for the ground states that has remarkably high overlap with exact diagonalization in both phases and throughout the phase transition. Our Ansatz is stable to adding some bosonic interactions beyond the on-site hard-core constraint. We confirm that the transition is well described by a projective translation symmetry-protected multiple parton bandgap closure, as has been previously predicted. However, unlike prior work, we find that our wave functions require anomalous (BCS-like) parton correlations to describe the phase transition and SF phase accurately.